Only Jesus made his father more famous. Harper Lee’s father was actually named Amasa, but, by the end of his life, he was answering to “Atticus Finch,” a reflection of how closely the character was modelled on him and how wildly well known his fictional doppelgänger had become. When “To Kill a Mockingbird” was published, in 1960, it instantly—and seemingly irrevocably—entered the canon of American literature; it won the Pulitzer Prize, was adapted into an Oscar-winning film, sold tens of millions of copies in more than forty languages, and was eventually assigned to half a century’s worth of middle-school students—some of whom were themselves named Atticus, or had pets named for his daughter, Scout, or her friend Dill, or their strange neighbor, Boo Radley.

“To Kill a Mockingbird” is now a kind of secular scripture, one of only a handful of texts most Americans have in common. This fall, millions of viewers voted it the nation’s “most beloved novel” on the PBS show “The Great American Read,” the literary equivalent of “American Idol.” That was long after Oprah Winfrey had already anointed it “our national novel.” Superlatives follow the book around like shadows, the longest of which is cast by the character of Atticus, the small-town lawyer who defends a black man, Tom Robinson, falsely accused of raping a white woman named Mayella Ewell.

Fictional characters walk off the page all the time, generally as cautionary tales, like Pollyanna or Walter Mitty, but Atticus has inspired legions of lawyers, been memorialized with a public sculpture, had professional-achievement awards and a nonprofit organization named after him, and been invoked admiringly by Barack Obama, who quoted one of the character’s folksy fatherisms in his farewell address as President: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

Like any legal precedent, though, Atticus has faced challenges and dissents, and lately his status as a hero has seemed perilously close to being overturned. Criticisms of his accommodationist racial politics, his classism, and his sexism went mainstream a few years ago, after the publication of an earlier novel by Lee, “Go Set a Watchman,” which gave us an older Atticus, and a less admirable one: a grownup Scout came home to Alabama from New York City to find that, in his dotage, her beloved father was opposing the work of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and attending meetings of a white-supremacist group.

With plenty of actual white men falling from their pedestals, it has seemed, ever since, that Atticus might do so, too. No longer a model of courage and decency even in his fictional daughter’s eyes, he turned out to be a man very much of his time—and, perhaps even worse, of ours, as old prejudices resurge, hate crimes proliferate, and arguments rage about the merits of maintaining civility in the face of bigotry. In October, the Republican senator John Cornyn invoked a talking point that had emerged among conservative commentators, calling the fight to appoint Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court “our Atticus Finch moment.” In doing so, Cornyn ignored the racist post-Reconstruction context of the allegation against Tom Robinson, the persuasiveness of Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against Kavanaugh, and the fact that all the nominee stood to lose was a job promotion, not his life.

Atticus was suddenly on all the wrong sides, fighting for all the wrong causes. It’s hard to imagine a less auspicious moment to try to bring the character back to life—and yet, for the first time ever, Lee’s beloved father figure is on Broadway, in a new theatrical adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” It’s not clear, though, whether Atticus is enjoying a revival or taking his final bow.

“Yes, Atticus was my father,” Harper Lee bluntly acknowledged in a letter to her former Shakespeare professor not long after “To Kill a Mockingbird” was published. Amasa Coleman Lee, the model for the man who was to be a model among men, was born twenty years before the start of the twentieth century, not long after his own father returned from fighting for the Confederacy. Amasa spent most of his early years in Florida, but a bookkeeping job took him to Finchburg, Alabama, where he met Harper Lee’s mother, Frances Cunningham Finch. (That’s where their daughter got the surname for her character; as for the unusual first name, it came from Cicero’s friend Titus Pomponius Atticus, although Lee likely learned it from the Montgomery Advertiser columnist Atticus Mullin, whose pieces she read regularly.)

After Amasa and Frances married, they settled in the county seat, Monroeville, where A.C., as he was known, had accepted a position managing a railroad line for a local law firm. On the side, he taught himself law, passed the bar exam, and got his name added to the shingle. The firm prospered, even during the Great Depression, and so did A.C., who was elected to the state legislature and bought the local newspaper, the Monroe Journal. He then availed himself of many of its column inches for his own editorials. In these articles, the real-life Atticus begins as a New Deal Democrat and ends as a Dixiecrat, honoring Confederate veterans and their cause, supporting the prosecution of the Scottsboro Boys—nine black teen-agers who were falsely accused of raping two white women—and defending the poll tax. He praised law-enforcement officers who protected black prisoners from lynchings but opposed a federal anti-lynching law, writing that it “violates the fundamental idea of states rights and is aimed as a form of punishment upon the southern people.”

A. C. Lee’s politics were lost on no one who knew him, least of all his daughter, who parodied the Monroe Journal in an issue of Rammer Jammer, the humor magazine at the University of Alabama. The Jackassonian Democrat, as the college kids called their version, featured white-hooded figures holding flaming crosses on the masthead and page after page of ersatz local gossip and rural humbuggery. In another issue of Rammer Jammer, Harper Lee mocked a piece of legislation that her father had endorsed: the Boswell Amendment, which required that voters be able to explicate the Constitution to the satisfaction of county registrars. A.C. claimed that it was not an attempt to suppress the black vote but to insure an educated electorate; in his daughter’s satirical version, the leader of “the Citizens’ Committee to Eradicate the Black Plague” designs a literacy test for voters so onerous that not even he can pass it.

Frictions between father and daughter only intensified after 1949, when Harper Lee dropped out of law school in Alabama and moved to New York to become a writer. A great many things were on the cusp of change: Alabama was a few years away from the court-ordered integration of its schools and the protest-driven integration of its buses and lunch counters; Lee, living on peanut-butter sandwiches and writing at a makeshift desk in a make-do apartment in Yorkville, was beginning her ten-year transformation from a small-town Southerner into a big-city author.

In “Atticus Finch: The Biography” (Basic Books), published earlier this year, Joseph Crespino, a historian at Emory University, argues, convincingly, that Lee’s fiction was an attempt “to work out her differences with her father.” However heroic A.C. had seemed to her as a child, the adult Harper Lee could see his faults, even if she could not quite parse them in prose. In “Go Set a Watchman,” her first attempt at fictionalizing him, Scout is twenty-six and living in New York, doing what, exactly, we never learn. The book recounts a trip back home, to Maycomb, where her older brother, Jem, is dead, her best friend, Hank, is desperate to marry and domesticate her, and her father has reacted to Brown v. Board of Education by joining the Citizens’ Council, a sort of genteel K.K.K. Atticus is what the historian Isabel Wilkerson has called “a gentleman bigot,” and “Watchman” is full of stilted exchanges between a benighted father and his more enlightened daughter. It wasn’t only bad storytelling; it was the sort of story that editors didn’t want to tell about the South. When Esquire refused a submission from Lee on the grounds that her Klan-hating, segregation-loving white characters were “an axiomatic impossibility,” she lamented to a friend that, if that were true, “nine-tenths of the South is an axiomatic impossibility.”

Advertisement

Realistic or not, the early, overtly racist Atticus of “Watchman” was rejected by nearly every publisher that met him. Tay Hohoff, an editor at J. P. Lippincott, decided to take a chance on Lee, but encouraged her to abandon the didactic, abrasive scenes between adults and focus on the manuscript’s endearing childhood scenes. For two years, Hohoff helped Lee create “To Kill a Mockingbird”: a coming-of-age story in which the protagonist and narrator, Scout—along with Jem and their summer sidekick, Dill—learns that she has misjudged the local outcast, Boo Radley, even as others in the town misjudge Tom Robinson. The novel is set exclusively during the Great Depression, leaving the civil-rights movement to hover in its margins, never overtly clashing with any character, including Atticus.

Once Lee committed to this shift, channelling her early adulation of her father came fairly easily, because, however much she disagreed with his politics, she loved him, and was terrified of losing him. Her father suffered from crippling arthritis and a weakening heart, and death was never far from Lee’s mind—a few years earlier, her mother and brother had both died suddenly. While she was finishing “Mockingbird,” Lee returned to Alabama often to help manage her father’s care. She sat with him by day, then sought out the quiet of his law office on the courthouse square to get some work done by night. It was there that she wrote the climactic scene in which Bob Ewell, Mayella’s father, attacks Scout and her brother; she scared herself so badly that she ran all the way home. Lee’s father lived long enough to start signing copies of her novel “Atticus Finch,” and to learn that his daughter had won the Pulitzer Prize. He had a fatal heart attack on Palm Sunday of 1962.

After her father died, Lee gave his pocket watch to Gregory Peck, who by then was starring in an adaptation of her novel. She cried when she first saw Peck in costume as Atticus, noting how much he looked like her father; a year later, he brought the watch with him onstage to accept an Oscar for his performance. For Lee, that version was definitive. “I’ve refused scores of requests from some mightily talented people to turn M’bird into everything from a Broadway play to an opera,” Lee wrote in a letter to Peck in the nineteen-eighties. “I have always said no for one reason: I cannot run the risk of having your Atticus diminished in public memory by so much as a scintilla.” She made one exception to this rule: always softhearted about children—she answered nearly all the many letters they sent to her—she eventually authorized a play for community-theatre groups, and there are, by now, scores of former Scouts and Jems and Dills across America. (In her home town, Monroeville, where the play is still performed every spring, some actors who started out playing kids have aged into the adult roles.)

Yet, the most enduring influence of the movie version of “Mockingbird” has as much to do with the screenplay, by Horton Foote, as with Peck’s performance: Atticus forever displaced Scout at the center of the story. Fiction’s most delightful tomboy-nerd, who spits and fights and learns to read long before most people around her think she should, narrates the movie, and, aside from the legal case, gets most of her father’s attention—but Atticus is the hero. And, for decades, that is what he remained, to viewers, readers, and the culture at large. Although there were occasional calls to ban the novel from schools, for its discussion of rape or for its use of racial slurs, it was only in 1992, when a law professor, Monroe Freedman, published an article declaring Atticus “a gentleman but no model for lawyers,” that the marble man of Lee’s novel started to crack.

In “Atticus Finch, Esq., R.I.P.,” which appeared in the professional journal Legal Times, Freedman notes that Atticus only defends Tom Robinson because he is forced to do so by the court, that he willingly participates in the segregation of his society, and that he insists on the human decency of even overt bigots. The case against Finch was taken up by another legal scholar, Steven Lubet, in the Michigan Law Review, seven years later, and began to spread to wider audiences. Then, in 2015, “Watchman” offered a flatly racist Atticus, who, rather than defend the courts as a place in which all citizens are equal, asks Scout, “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters?” Atticus now seemed less a role model than a case study for college seminars on the history of Jim Crow.

Educators and parents began to challenge the enshrinement of “Mockingbird” on school syllabi, not because its material was too sensitive for students, as conservatives had once argued, but because it was too insensitive. The novelist Alice Randall recently asked whether a text “written by a privileged daughter of the Old South should still take up space in curriculum that could be well used to expose students to literary voices on race and injustice that have emerged in the past 50 years.” Randall pointed out that the story could be equally disturbing for a black boy in Mississippi who experiences the ongoing reality of racism and worries that he might one day be on trial like Tom Robinson and for a white girl in New York City who has been raped and worries about being treated like Mayella Ewell if she comes forward.

After all, although Mayella falsely accuses Tom, she has, in fact, been assaulted—by her father, whose full name, we learn in passing, is Robert E. Lee Ewell. But even Atticus is silent about Mayella’s abuse by her father, except for a brief moment in the courtroom, when it serves his cause. To Scout, he explains the Ewells by claiming that certain crimes, from hunting violations to domestic violence, just run in poor families. In “White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America” (Viking), the historian Nancy Isenberg accurately summarizes Atticus’s reaction to the most impoverished members of his community: “The Ewells were members of the terminally poor, those whose status could not be lifted or debased by an economic fluctuation—not even the Depression. They were human waste.” Into the late nineties, Lee herself would complain, in letters, about how Snopeses—the name Faulkner gave to his equivalent of the Ewells, in Yoknapatawpha County—had taken over her home town.

In other ways, too, “Mockingbird” has always been more complicated than our cultural memory of it allows—not just on class, but also on race. In her recent book “Reading Harper Lee” (Greenwood), the critic Claudia Durst Johnson considers the killing of Tom Robinson in the context of police shootings and misconduct, and analyzes the often forgotten character Dolphus Raymond, the wealthy white man who becomes a pariah in Maycomb after falling in love with a black woman and having children with her. These and so many of the novel’s other intricacies are overlooked in favor of increasingly well-worn arguments about the standing of Atticus. And yet, even there, we would do well to read the novel more closely. Although it features children, it is not childish; its charm, and its internal logic, is that Atticus is a hero in the eyes of his young daughter, not that he is objectively heroic.

Advertisement

Perhaps his perfection was only ever as a father, and not as a civil-rights crusader. He teaches Scout and Jem a kind of radical empathy that he himself cannot sustain but that they might grow up to embody. That is the version of Atticus still beloved by many of the book’s readers: not a noble lawyer on a par with actual civil-rights heroes such as Pauli Murray, Thurgood Marshall, or Morris Dees (a founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and one of the many lawyers who say they owe their choice of profession to Atticus) but a compassionate, courageous single dad raising his children as best he can.

That Atticus is almost nowhere to be found in “Watchman,” which was published shortly after the death of Lee’s older sister Alice, her longtime lawyer, and amid claims that Lee herself was too compromised by age and a severe stroke to make her own decisions. The surprise release of the book occasioned all kinds of speculation. Some people worried that it was the result of coercion, and amounted to elder abuse of a national treasure. But a few people who knew Lee wondered if perhaps she was trying, if not to sabotage her literary legacy, at least to alter it, so that by the time she died, the white-savior version of Atticus Finch would die with her.

Instead, in a surprising turn of events, Atticus has now migrated, as Lee herself once did, from Alabama to Manhattan. Just before Lee’s death, in February, 2016, the producer Scott Rudin announced that she had sold him the rights to a Broadway adaptation—the same rights she once swore to Gregory Peck that she would never grant to anyone. By the time Rudin made his purchase public, Aaron Sorkin had signed on to write the script. When Jeff Daniels agreed to star as Atticus, it turned into a reunion of sorts: Rudin and Sorkin had worked together on “The Social Network” and “Moneyball,” and Daniels had acted in their bio-pic “Steve Jobs” and on their HBO show, “The Newsroom,” in which he played the television anchor Will McAvoy, who was on a crusade to restore facts and ethics to cable news.

In characteristic Sorkin fashion, “The Newsroom” abounded in moral dilemmas and witty dialogue, but it was widely criticized for the weakness of its female characters and for another Sorkin hallmark: the positioning of a white male establishment figure as the best hope for righting a listing nation. Sorkin’s most famous creation, President Josiah Bartlet, of “The West Wing,” is the same type, albeit a Democrat rather than, like McAvoy, a Republican. And so, while it is surprising for Sorkin to take on Jim Crow Alabama, he is, in other ways, a logical choice to bring “Mockingbird” into the twenty-first century: an undeniably gifted and undeniably contemporary scriptwriter who is also, for good or ill, undeniably in sympathy with the palliative impulses of the novel.

Not everyone, however, was inclined to agree, and not long after Rudin announced that Sorkin’s play would première in December, 2018, the estate of Harper Lee filed a lawsuit, alleging that the adaptation violated the spirit of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” At the heart of the dispute was a disagreement about the essential nature of Atticus. According to the estate, the character, as written by Lee, was “a model of wisdom, integrity, and professionalism,” while Sorkin had made him into an “apologist for the racial status quo.” Rudin countersued, alleging, among other things, that Tonja Carter, the representative of the estate, was not only “a contentious figure,” given the role she played in the unexpected and extremely lucrative decision to publish “Go Set a Watchman,” but perhaps even an illegitimate one. Carter had been both an agent and a personal lawyer for the living Harper Lee; now, even more unusually, she was acting simultaneously as agent, lawyer, and executor of the Lee estate. For a book and a play that are largely about the moral high ground, the legal brouhaha unfolded in a kind of boggy moral bottomland. Its greatest moment came when Rudin, either in a grand expression of confidence in Sorkin’s script, or unable to resist the meta-theatrical opportunity presented to him, offered to stage the entire play for a trial judge, in the courtroom.

Regrettably, that play within a lawsuit about a courtroom drama never happened, partly because both sides had compelling reasons to settle. Carter presumably did not want the estate’s confidential workings revealed via discovery, and Rudin could not afford any more delays. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed, so it is impossible to know for sure to what extent the version currently onstage was altered, but, according to Sorkin, only three minor revisions of his version of Atticus were mandated: a devout Methodist, he wouldn’t take the Lord’s name in vain, have a rifle in the house, or drink away his pain after losing his case. Otherwise, the show could go on, and it has: in previews since November, it opens officially, at the Shubert Theatre, this week.

The children are now played by adults; Calpurnia, the Finches’ black housekeeper, gets to argue a bit with her employer about his tolerance of intolerance; and Atticus—sounding, Sorkin has noted in interviews, a little like President Trump—says that there are good people on both sides of a lynch mob. It was Trump’s comments after a counter-protester was killed by a white supremacist in Charlottesville that, Sorkin has said, helped him see the contemporary resonance of the play.

In an essay for New York, Sorkin recounts how, after finishing a bad draft, he realized that he could not “swaddle the book in bubble wrap and transfer it gently to a stage”; instead, he focussed on Atticus and his transformation from one kind of man into another. In this new production, the empathy for which Atticus has always been celebrated—his belief, as Sorkin sees it, in the “goodness in everyone, even homicidal white supremacists”—would be his fundamental flaw. Of course, framing Atticus in this way compounds the complication of putting him at the center of the story: the tragedy, it suggests, isn’t that a black man loses his life, but that a white man loses his case.

In the novel, Atticus is never so naïve as to imagine he can win. Nor is his daughter, who, even as a child, accurately assesses the chance that a black man would get a fair trial in that time and place. After Scout learns of Tom’s death she says, “Atticus had used every tool available to free men to save Tom Robinson, but in the secret courts of men’s hearts Atticus had no case. Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed.”

It is a strange feature of the reception of “Mockingbird” that so many of us wonder who Atticus “really” was instead of wondering who that astute little girl would have eventually become. In “Watchman,” she’s left the Deep South but hasn’t figured out what to do about the people who stayed behind. Lee herself kept curiously silent on the subject of civil rights, never lending her voice publicly to the movement with which she was so closely associated.

But her novel did plenty of talking for her, and millions of Americans credit Harper Lee with teaching them how to understand difference. It is a mark of progress in our culture that many who read Lee’s fiction now heed the advice of Atticus and imagine walking around Maycomb in the skin of Calpurnia or Mayella, leaving Atticus himself looking considerably less heroic. It is apt that Sorkin, for his adaptation, chose not to cast a jury. The audience of “To Kill a Mockingbird” itself seems to sit in judgment—not of Tom Robinson, whose innocence is clear, but of the lawyer who was never supposed to be on trial. ♦

Published in the print edition of the December 17, 2018, issue, with the headline “Power of Attorney.”